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Christendom

Apologetics

Editor’s Note: The following is Lucius Vanini’s response to the latest Christian apologetic article appearing in Kevin MacDonald’s The Occidental Observer (TOO):
 

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The article makes much of an absence of race-related doctrine in Christianity, and the author seems to think that such absence leaves Christians free to be White Nationalists if they choose. Well, they are thus free to choose–to be at odds with moral doctrines that are stated and explicit. If Christian morality enjoined taking rather than giving, pride rather than humility, fierce retaliation instead of non-resistance and even the invitation of further aggression, and bias toward the strong and highly-placed instead of for the lowly and poor (like blacks usually are), then becoming White Nationalists would be consonant with Christianity.

But Christian morality does not so enjoin. No, it says the opposite. Hence, while it doesn’t explicitly tell us to be racially self-abnegating, its all-embracing altruism, its enmity toward ‘selfishness’, are very consonant with racial self-abnegation–if indeed they don’t imply the rectitude thereof. So, again, when Merkel said that her migrant-friendly politics are alone consistent with Christian teachings, she was spot on. In contrast, Whites who combine self-identification as Christians with Viking in-group preference, together with a readiness to strike back against threats to their group, are hypocrites–they behave against the grain of the creed they profess to honour. Europeans did this for ages and thus (with the help of the Pagan revolt known as the Renaissance) were able to revive European greatness after a long nadir. But there were drawbacks: (1) they were monsters of falsity; (2) their lip service to Christianity preserved the religion for such Europeans as were able to practice its morality of un-selfing.

That Christianity doesn’t talk much about race is, at the very least, no positive help to the development of White in-group preference. So why must we even consider it, since there are creeds which do explicitly deal with race and explicitly enjoin White Racialism? There’s the Cosmotheism of William Luther Pierce and the Creativity of Ben Klassen. These Racialist creeds not only call for doing whatever will enable Whites to preserve themselves, to prevail and prosper, but enable Whites to be self-consistent, whole, honest, without hypocrisy.

The article seems to place importance on the Bible’s recognition that there are different kinds of humans. Why? Has that any more importance than remarking that a pine is different from an oak tree? Such a prosaic observation doesn’t say that different kinds can’t be integrated or even amalgamated. And as long as nothing is said about preferring the kind which one belongs to, it’s of no help to us; and again there still are the other parts which contravene self-preference, pride, resistance–things all of a piece with racial White self-assertion.

That Christians today don’t ask blacks or non-White Hispanics to ‘jettison’ their racial identity, while Whites are urged to jettison theirs, is a wholly natural outcome of Christian ‘otherself-interest’ and condemnation of egoism and pride. These Christians–and the bigger group, the post-Christians who’ve inherited Christian altruism while having dispensed with the metaphysics–think they are being righteous or moral because they are selfless–since they, being White, are willing to let those who are not White get a leg up on them. Pure decadence, of course.

The failure of Saul of Tarsus (whom the articles refer to as Paul) to condemn boundaries between peoples begs another consideration to accompany it–assuming that he did believe in a Second Coming which would sweep away the world order and replace it with something quite different. His not decrying something as a problem could very well have betokened an unconcern about it–a contempt for something whose days are numbered.

So as not to write an article here in the comments section, I’ll limit myself to the above. Yet I must say I’m struck by the author’s partiality to Jews. Funny, in his posts in TOO’s comments section, which I’ve read and controverted, I saw sweeping statements about the incurable wickedness of Jews. His disapprobation thereof is such that I recall him asking, during a discussion of Jews’ racial nature, why we should even want Jews to be White–as if our desire could determine their ethnic/genetic character; and that sounded to me like pretty deep hatred. Well, such hatred would be understandable enough–if it weren’t for the fact that he also derives his beloved creed, his pantheon of soothsayers, and his very God from that same ethnic group! Saul, and every one of the twelve disciples and the apostles was an ethnic Jew, as was the carpenter of Nazareth, born the son of the God of Israel and a scion of the House of King David of Israel. Hmm. Do the bad guys include the very best guys?

And I’d be very curious to know whether the author contends, like some Christians do, that Christianity and Judaism are wholly separate phenomena. He seems to think that passages of the Old Testament, the pre-Christian Judaic scriptures, are one with his creed. Well, if so, isn’t the messianic religion adapted for the goyim in some degree an extension of the original messianism just for Jews, such that tenets of the latter also apply to adherents of the former?

 

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Editor’s note: Lucius Vanini added the next day:
 

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I can’t resist asking the article’s author the following questions:

1) Does he recommend White Nationalism to the congregation of his church? I notice that, among non-Christian White Nationalists, Christians constantly stump for Jesus and Saul; but I don’t get a sense that they try to favorably dispose non-WN Christian congregations toward White ‘racialism’ (or, the term I prefer, ‘racism’–because that’s what discrimination based on race is, notwithstanding that it may consist merely in preferring Whites to all others).

If the author isn’t trying to publish a White-Advocacy article on an ecclesiastical website, or making comments sympathizing with WN perspectives under Christian articles, it’ll confirm my belief that he thinks Christians have a better idea of what’s important than White Advocates do. Equally it underscores another reason why Christians who say they’re WNs are a problem for the Cause–namely that their creed is more important to them than are peculiarly White interests.

2) How can he assure his co-religionists–or even himself–that rejecting intimate association with sincere black Christians is righteous? Are not such blacks his brothers in Christ? How can he prefer infidel Whites to his brothers in Christ? Since race is what most counts with me, White Christians like him are allowed into the Ethnostate I dream of, whereas blacks who share my religious views are excluded. Can he share my biases and thus be a thoroughgoing White Partisan?

Remember, his creed doesn’t say that preferring Whites is important, but places supreme importance on accepting Christ as Redeemer. If Whites don’t accept Jesus as their savior–and perhaps a majority of WN Whites never will–how can a true Christian prefer them to blacks who do?

3) Talking of a coming holy kingdom wherein where all conflicts have been ended, is he aware that the Christian expectation thereof is a reason why Whites don’t espouse White Advocacy? I get around, not only in cyberspace but geographically; and wherever I go, I talk to Conservative Whites about White partisanship; and time after time I hear them say, ‘All these troubles are signs of the last days, and it’s good they’re happening, because it means Jesus is coming soon and only he can make things right’. Though RockaBoatus [the author of the TOO piece] might differ with them about the timetable, a whole lot of them think that if anything the Second Coming is past due; and I don’t see how he knows better than they. Christians have believed that the end of ‘this world’ is nigh ever since they heard ‘There are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming into his Kingdom’ (so says the literary character Jesus in the books of Matthew, Luke and Mark)–and that’s going on two millennia ago…

Of course, the whole narrative is aware of snake-oil salesmen, mere mythology. But the upshot in any case is that when people think troubles herald an end to all trouble, they’ll accept them; and when they expect a supernatural personage to make everything right, they’ll rest content with ‘having faith’.

4) If because of exploding population Africa suffers famines, will he support White efforts to relieve those famines? With the highest birth-rates in the world, black-African numbers burgeon and often lead to food shortages; but they also overflow toward and into Europe. Would RockaBoatus be for letting black children starve to death instead of enabling them to live and help continue the proliferation? I know exactly where I’d stand. As a racist, to whom nothing is more valuable than White well-being, I’d let all sub-Sahara starve if that could benefit Europe. But as a Christian, can RockaBoatus reject the option of ‘charity’? Can he be for letting children starve?

5) Will he favour the abolition of abortion, which in the USA has kept black numbers down because blacks use it as birth control, aborting five times as often as Whites do? At 40+ million, American blacks commit hundreds of thousands of violent crimes against Whites per year–at least 1480 per day–and an alleged 86% of them vote Leftist, helping elect Marxists and black mayors who ruin cities and DAs who abet crime. And for abortion the black pop could easily be 80+ million.

So will our Christian writer favour devoting so much time, money and work to doubling this trouble by reversing Roe v. Wade, when the cheapest and least risky option possible–doing nothing–will enable Whites’ natural enemies to continue culling their own numbers?

Categories
Christendom

Bed of roses

In the mornings, after a good few hours of resting the brain, the mind is in a pristine state; and if we skip breakfast for coffee, our best thoughts come to us philosophers with extraordinary lucidity. On my morning walk to warm up this winter, one of those thoughts came to me again, albeit in a more focused way.

We have been saying on this site that the moralistic framework that whites inherited from Christianity is the cause of their decline. The idea that again came to me this morning is that we could compare that framework to an operating system that, at its core, is malware that inverted our values (recall what we have been saying about the Gospel of Mark from which the other three Gospels and even the so-called Acts of the Apostles were derived).

Left, book by Pope. Note how the old painting depicts Mark the Evangelist as a non-white.

If that operating system or Christian Question (CQ) is the basis of all evil, it is very easy to understand the Jewish Question (JQ). Once the operating system installed in the minds of whites is malware, all subversive programs loaded onto that operating system fall on a bed of roses. In other words, everything that Kevin MacDonald’s The Culture of Critique complains about flourishes in the most fertile soil imaginable if the soil is fertilised with Christian ethics.

That’s why we say that the JQ is a secondary issue, and that the primary issue is that damned malware installed on us by Semitic religionists and white traitors since Constantine, though only now has the malware of the mind reached its lethal metastasis.

Medicine is the transvaluation of Judaized values to National Socialist values. Attacking Jewry without attacking Christianity results in the ethnosuicide of E. Michael Jones, who doesn’t give a damn if Europeans become mulattoes as long as they are Catholic. Christian ethics induces even anti-Christian racialists to ethnosuicide! Recall #9 of this year’s first post: ‘No mercy and showing respect to the “right to a living space for all peoples”, as Varg Vikernes does’ (compare his stance with the opening essay of my Day of Wrath, recently censored by the printer Lulu).

In other words, it’s impossible to solve the JQ without first addressing the CQ. What the racial right does in North America and Europe (I am reminded of a conversation I had in London with the traditional Catholic Jez Turner, head person of the now-defunct London Forum) is to put the cart before the horse. It is hilarious that even anti-Christians who have commented here, such as Claudius, believe that it is I who put the cart before the horse when it is they who do it.

I have used mixed metaphors in this post, but it seems to me that the one about the operating system that is sunshine and flowers for subversive programs gives the idea of what we are talking about in The West’s Darkest Hour.

In a nutshell, no CQ no JQ.

Categories
Christendom

PS to my post yesterday

Of course, the fear of eternal damnation was another introjection (or ‘malware installed’) by the parents: something that only those Christians who were brought up in a very traditional, old time Christianity could understand. To new generations of Christians, including racialist Christians, what I said yesterday could seem unheard of and even bizarre. (In book #5 of my eleven books I explain how such introject originated in my young mind.)

See, for example, what I said about Erasmus in 2012. The old theology took hell for granted, and young children were taught this maddening doctrine. When I lived in Spain they told me that some of the older people still suffered from this fear.

Categories
Christendom

A forum comment

Europeans have begun setting the intellectual basis for the final rejection and collapse of Christianity. I, however, project that no intellectual argument will defeat Christianity. Reality will.

It will collapse under the sheer force and relentless evolutionary pathway of the universe. Already in terms of real spiritual substance and vitality, Christianity is dead. It’s just the empty crust that needs some good wind to blow it away. But this is not so obvious to the unobserving eye because the churches are still filled, the coffers full of money and the choir still sings. But I tell you that the church has triumphed over Christianity. Christianity is dead. Only its tomb (churches) remain and they too will be swept away.

Please read the 17-part series on ‘Why Europeans Must Reject Christianity’. Read the comments. Don’t be miffed at the somewhat racial sentiments cos it’s a white nationalist site. Just remember that they too have abandoned Christianity and seek to drive the movement deeper. (Navigate your way through the site to read the article in an orderly fashion.)

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Editor’s Note: The commenter refers to Ferdinand Bardamu’s essay. It is no longer necessary to read it in the form of blog entries as it now appears on pages 571-641 of The Fair Race.

Categories
Christendom

Linder on Christianity

Listen to what Alex Linder says about Xtianity: here, here, here, here, here and here.

Or if you want to listen to the whole thing, almost 8 hours of interview, click: here. In one the last minutes Linder said: ‘I really really have thought a lot about Christianity, and studied it a hell of a lot and when I eventually write something it is going to be part about it. Because I think that is the biggest unexplored territory in relation to racialism and the whole movement—the political aspect of it. That part has not been worked out. I honestly believe that even the significant people in racialism underestimated the problems that come from that direction and [are] basically tolerating it openly as some kind of good a neutral thing. But I literally could go on and on for seven more hours, he he! Anyway…’

Categories
Christendom

Costello on Christianity

Sometimes I wonder if some white nationalists who get their stuff published in mainstream nationalist webzines read this site but never admit they do (like those who never admit watching porn once in a while). This month for example, Jef Costello, a regular essayist of Counter Currents, said this in the comments section:

It doesn’t matter to me what most Americans think about Christianity. We have to wake up to the fact that that religion is the source of all the Leftist poison.

Emphasis added. In the very article itself, Costello had written:

It is really this that I was referring to when I said earlier that we are witnessing the climax of historical processes that have been spiraling downward for more than a thousand years.

This sounds exactly like the thesis of ‘The Red Giant’, a text originally written ten years ago.

It began with the importation into the West of the Jewish bacillus of Christianity. The Reformation began the process of denuding that religion of the supernatural and moving it toward a pure and simple moral fanaticism set against life and human nature. Leftism is just Protestant Christianity secularized and radicalized, made truer to its poisonous essence.

And this sounds like the essay by Ferdinand Bardamu, an original for this site, that has been included in the current edition of The Fair Race’s Darkest Hour.

And in the twisted, soy-fueled faces of today’s Leftists, the horror of the whole thing is finally unmasked: the great, yawning maw of the volcanic demon Yahweh, whose foul spirit devours healthy men and nations from the inside out. This is the horror’s final stage. This is the significance of the time we are living in.

Even if Costello has not visited this site, what he says above is identical to what we have been saying here.

Categories
Christendom

Stop being insane

Editor’s note: Below, a passage from an article by Kevin Alfred Strom, ‘Stop Being Insane’, published on National Vanguard in 2017. Strom’s entire article hits the nail as to why the Christian problem is larger than the Jewish problem. Not only the traitors are more wicked than Jews (as betraying your own race is morally worse than an external foe who wants to exterminate you), but there are more demented Christians than external foes.

Of Strom’s piece, pay special attention to the sentences: ‘They [American Christians] may not know where their own people were 2,000 years ago, what they lived and died for, what they believed, how their ancestors struggled…’ And also: ‘they [evangelicals] view Jewish history as their own’. On the other hand, ‘They see images of our Germanic or Classical ancestors and there is not the slightest sign of recognition in their dull eyes’.

Do you see now why stories or foundation myths are so important? Do you see why every single white nationalist must read William Pierce’s story about their race?, why Christian-friendly white nationalism is so ridiculously blind?
 

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And the “Christian Embassy” behind all these projects is just a small-time operation, a tiny fraction of the overall Christian support for the Jews and their murderous state given by the likes of Pat Robertson, Liberty University, John Hagee, and their ilk!

These deranged White men have been programmed by a 2,000-year-old psyop to work against their own best interests and use their money and energy to help Jews, when there are poor White children in this country who will never reach their potential for lack of money, and honorable White grandmothers who eat out of dumpsters or go hungry.

Why do these fools care so much about Israel? According to the magazine Christianity Today,

Many evangelicals have vivid memories of sitting in Sunday school rooms, staring at maps of Bible Lands and listening to Bible stories week after week. Through such experiences, evangelicals came to view the Bible’s story as their own and the land of the Bible as a kind of home away from home.

They may not know where their own people were 2,000 years ago, what they lived and died for, what they believed, how their ancestors struggled so that they might live and have the blessings of civilization—but they sure know, or think they know, all about the Jews; they view Jewish history as their own and call the Middle East the “Holy Land”; and identify with the Jews as a kind of superior and more godly version of themselves. They see images of our Germanic or Classical ancestors and there is not the slightest sign of recognition in their dull eyes. But show them a picture of a Jew in the desert near a burning bush and they identify with it instantly. How bizarre this is—and how infinitely tragic.

No doubt these “Christian Zionists,” as they sometimes call themselves, sincerely believe the Jewish verse they constantly quote again and again: “To the Jew first!” To the Jew first, indeed!

Can’t you see how insane this is? The Jews support their own institutions, their own state, their own people, as any rational nation would do. But millions of the men and women of our European civilization, White men and women, heirs of the greatest culture the world has ever known, do not support their own people. With the words written by an alien race—“to the Jew first!”—upon their lips, they ignore the basic needs for the survival of their own race, their own nation, and ignore even the cries and suffering of their own poor and destitute, and give their all for the Jews. They justify and support genocide and brutal occupation (if done by Jews), and gladly tax themselves and sacrifice the lives of their children to make it possible. All based on a preposterous hoax that Jews are somehow holy and sacred and intimately connected to God.

What fantastic power to control the minds of their hosts the Jews attained when they hit upon the brilliant idea of taking over monotheism and remaking it in the image of their tribal, ethnocentric god Yahweh.

Not only will this misplaced loyalty and religious perversion be fatal to us and lead to our extinction in the long run if it is allowed to continue, but it is extremely dangerous in the short term as well.

Categories
Christendom Poetry Theology

Depressing days

El Greco’s landscape of Toledo depicts the priory in which John of the Cross was held captive. To see the Greco landscape in the original blue and green click: here.

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I do not have a single male friend in the metropolis where I live.

Since I have finished writing my third and last book in Spanish—I really should not write another one!—as often happens with writers, an existential void was created in my state of mind.

I visited the Café of the Gandhi Bookstore where many years ago I was meeting with a group of friends. But I did not see any familiar faces.

Back home I realised that I had forgotten to buy a book. I have been quoting the expression ‘dark night of the soul’ in this site, taken from a famous poem by John of the Cross (1542-1591). For centuries this Spaniard has had a reputation as a profound mystic, and I wanted to read his book explaining the poem on the dark night of the soul.

At home I saw the book online. It surprised me that it contained concepts such as fighting the demon of lust and the devil. That means that John of the Cross was another idiotic Christian like millions of idiotic Christians who have been there for two millennia. The only difference is that his poetry is good. His poem starts with these words (translated to English):

In an obscure night Fevered with love’s anxiety (O hapless, happy plight!) I went, none seeing me Forth from my house, where all things quiet be…

But Aztec poetry was also good despite its psychotic customs, as I have shown elsewhere. In other words, aesthetic qualities do not vindicate the poet.

When trying to invent an activity these days I caressed the idea of having a podcast again. But I dispatched it: even if I did find a technician to handle the audio, my revolutionary thinking is not legal even by First Amendment standards in the US. And if I cannot speak out as a revolutionary conspirator, it is better not to talk at all because not saying what I think depresses me.

It is truly a dark night of the soul to have to live in a world in which whites, for the first time in western history, refuse to fight. Both the image of my previous post and what a commenter said in that thread epitomise what I mean.

Categories
Ancient Rome Christendom Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums (books)

Christianity’s Criminal History, 115

Editors’ note: To contextualise these translations of Karlheinz Deschner’s encyclopaedic history of the Church in 10-volumes, Kriminalgeschichte des Christentums, read the abridged translation of Volume I.
 
Head hunting

Christendom liked to contemplate the heads of defeated enemies; the rulers found pleasure in it and also the governed. It was customary to send throughout the Empire the heads of the notable men who had been punished, as trophies of war. As Mark Twain said in The Mysterious Stranger, ‘They all did their best—to kill being the chiefest ambition of the human race and the earliest incident in its history—but only the Christian civilization has scored a triumph to be proud of. Two or three centuries from now it will be recognized that all the competent killers are Christians…’

Already Constantine, the first Christian ruler, made that in the year 312, after the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, his troops took the head of the emperor Maxentius in the triumphal procession, throwing stones and excrement, and then sent to Africa. Also the head of the usurper Julius Nepotianus, who rebelled probably at the behest of Constantinople, was paraded in the year 350 in Rome, the 28th day of his government.

Three years later, in many provinces of the Empire they could contemplate the head of the usurper Magnentius; as a sign of Christian victory, the heads of Procopius, a relative of Emperor Julian, in 366; of Magnus Maximus in 388, and of Eugene in 394. At the end of the 4th century or the beginning of the 5th century, the heads of Rufinus, Constantine III, Jovin, Sebastian and even, at times, the relatives of fallen persons in disgrace were exposed.

In addition to their hostile policy to the Goths, the governments of Arcadius and Honorius were characterised for persecuting so-called ‘pagans’ and ‘heretics’, and for taking even more stringent measures than those of their father, who in 388 still greeted the priests of classical culture in Emona, belonging at that time to Italy.

Categories
Catholic Church Catholic religious orders Christendom Darkening Age (book) Emperor Julian Free speech / association Libanius Ovid

Darkening Age, 21

Pieter Coecke van Aelst, Story of Saint Paul: The Burning of the
Books at Ephesus
, designed ca. 1529, woven before 1546 (medium:
wool and silk, woven under the direction of Jan van der Vyst).

Editor’s note.Bold-typed emphasis in the last paragraph is mine. In chapter eleven of The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World, Catherine Nixey wrote:

In Egypt, a fearsome monk and saint named Shenoute entered the house of a man suspected of being a pagan and removed all his books. The Christian habit of book-burning went on to enjoy a long history. A millennium later, the Italian preacher Savonarola wanted the works of the Latin love poets Catullus, Tibullus and Ovid to be banned while another preacher said that all of these ‘shameful books’ should be let go, because if you are Christians you are obliged to burn them’…

* * *

Before there had been competing philosophical schools, all equally valid, all equally arguable. Now, for the first time, there was right—and there was wrong. Now, there was what the Bible said—and there was everything else. And from now on any belief that was ‘wrong’ could, in the right circumstances, put you in grave danger.

As Dirk Rohmann has highlighted, Augustine said that works that opposed Christian doctrine had no place in Christian society and had scant time for much of Greek philosophy. The Greeks, Augustine said dismissively, ‘have no ground for boasting of their wisdom’. The Church’s authors were greater, and more ancient. John Chrysostom went far further. He described pagan philosophy as a madness, the mother of evils and a disease.

Classical literature was filled with the incorrect and demonic and it came under repeated and vicious attack from the Church Fathers. Atheism, science and philosophy were all targeted. The very idea that mankind could explain everything through science was, as Rohmann has shown, disparaged as folly. ‘Stay clear of all pagan books!’ the Apostolic Constitutions advised Christians bluntly. ‘For what do you have to do with such foreign discourses, or laws, or false prophets, which subvert the faith of the unstable?’ If you wish to read about history, it continued, ‘you have the Books of Kings; if philosophy and poetry, you have the Prophets, the Book of Job and the Proverbs, in which you will find greater depth of sagacity than in all of the pagan poets and philosophers because this is the voice of the Lord… Do therefore always stay clear of all such strange and diabolical books!’…

An accusation of ‘magic’ was frequently the prelude to a spate of burnings. In Beirut, at the turn of the sixth century, a bishop ordered Christians, in the company of civil servants, to examine the books of those suspected of this. Searches were made, books were seized from suspects and then brought to the centre of the city and placed in a pyre. A crowd was ordered to come and watch as the Christians lit this bonfire in front of the church of the Virgin Mary. The demonic deceptions and ‘barbarous and atheistic arrogance’ of these books were condemned as ‘everybody’ watched ‘the magic books and the demonic signs burn’. As with the destruction of temples, there was no shame in this…

What did the books burned on such occasions really contain? Doubtless some did contain ‘magic’—such practices were popular prior to Christianity and certainly didn’t disappear with its arrival. But they were not all. The list given in the life of St Simeon clearly refers to the destruction of books of Epicureanism, the philosophy that advocated the theory of atomism. ‘Paganism’ appears to have been a charge in itself—and while it could mean outlawed practices it could, at a stretch, refer to almost any antique text that contained the gods. Christians were rarely good chroniclers of what they burned.

Sometimes, clues to the texts remain. In Beirut, just before the bonfire of the books, pious Christians had gone to the house of a man suspected of owning books that were ‘hateful to God’. The Christians told him that they ‘wanted the salvation and recovery of his soul’; they wanted ‘liberation’. These Christians then entered his home, inspected his books and searched each room. Nothing was found—until the man was betrayed by his slave. Forbidden books were discovered in a secret compartment in a chair. The man whose house it was—clearly well aware of what such ‘liberation’ might involve—‘fell to the ground and begged us, in tears, not to hand him over to the law’. He was spared the law but forced to burn his books. As our chronicler Zachariah records with pleasure, ‘when the fire was lit he threw the books of magic into it with his own hands, and said that he thanked God who had granted him with his visit and liberated him from the slavery and error of demons’. One of the books removed from the house in Beirut is mentioned: it is very possible it was not magic but a history by a disapproved-of Egyptian historian.

Divination and prophecy were often used as pretexts to attack a city’s elite. One of the most infamous assaults on books and thinkers took place in Antioch. Here, at the end of the fourth century, an accusation of treasonous divination led to a full-scale purge that targeted the city’s intellectuals. By sheer chance, Ammianus Marcellinus, a non-Christian and one of the finest historians of the era, happened to be in the city; a wonderful piece of luck for later historians and wretched luck for the man himself, who was horrified. As Ammianus describes it,

the racks were set up, and leaden weights, cords, and scourges put in readiness. The air was filled with the appalling yells of savage voices mixed with the clanking of chains, as the torturers in the execution of their grim task shouted: ‘Hold, bind, tighten, more yet.’

A noble of ‘remarkable literary attainments’ was one of the first to be arrested and tortured; he was followed by a clutch of philosophers who were variously tortured, burned alive and beheaded. Educated men in the city who had considered themselves fortunate now, Damocles-like, realized the fragility of their fortune. Looking up, it was as if they saw ‘swords hung over their heads suspended by horse-hairs from the ceiling’.

And, once again, there was the burning of books as bonfires of volumes were used as post-hoc justification for the slaughter. Ammianus Marcellinus writes with distaste that

innumerable books and whole heaps of documents, which had been routed out from various houses, were piled up and burnt under the eyes of the judges. They were treated as forbidden texts to allay the indignation caused by the executions, though most of them were treatises on various liberal arts and on jurisprudence. 

Many intellectuals started to pre-empt the persecutors and set light to their own books. The destruction was extensive and ‘throughout the eastern provinces whole libraries were burnt by their owners for fear of a similar fate; such was the terror which seized all hearts’. Ammianus wasn’t the only intellectual to be scared in these decades. The orator Libanius burned a huge number of his own works…

* * *

The Great Library of Alexandria might have attempted to collect books on every topic, but Christianity was going to be considerably more selective…

One surviving Byzantine manuscript of Ovid has been scarred by a series of ridiculous redactions—even the word ‘girl’ seems to have been considered too racy to remain. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Jesuits were still censoring and bowdlerizing their editions of the classics. Individual abbots, far from Umberto Eco’s avenging intellectual ideal, sometimes censored their own libraries. At some point in the fifteenth century, a note was left in a mutilated manuscript in Vienna. ‘At this point in the book,’ it records, ‘there were thirteen leaves containing works by the apostate Julian; the abbot of the monastery… read them and realised that they were dangerous, so he threw them into the sea.’

Much classical literature was preserved by Christians. Far more was not. To survive, manuscripts needed to be cared for, recopied. Classical ones were not. Medieval monks, at a time when parchment was expensive and classical learning held cheap, simply took pumice stones and scrubbed the last copies of classical works from the page. Rohmann has pointed out that there is even evidence to suggest that in some cases ‘whole groups of classical works were deliberately selected to be deleted and overwritten in around AD 700, often with texts authored by [the fathers of the Church or by] legal texts that criticised or banned pagan literature’. Pliny, Plautus, Cicero, Seneca, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, Livy and many, many more: all were scrubbed away by the hands of believers…

The texts that suffer in this period are the texts of the wicked and sinful pagans. From the entirety of the sixth century only ‘scraps’ of two manuscripts by the satirical Roman poet Juvenal survive and mere ‘remnants’ of two others, one by the Elder and one by the Younger Pliny.

From the next century there survives nothing save a single fragment of the poet Lucan.

From the start of the next century: nothing at all.

Far from mourning the loss, Christians delighted in it. As John Chrysostom crowed, the writings ‘of the Greeks have all perished and are obliterated’. He warmed to the theme in another sermon: ‘Where is Plato? Nowhere! Where Paul? In the mouths of all!’

The fifth-century writer Theodoret of Cyrrhus observed the decline of Greek literature with similar enthusiasm. ‘Those elaborately decorated fables have been utterly banned,’ he gloated. ‘Who is today’s head of the Stoic heresy? Who is safeguarding the teachings of the Peripatetics?’ No one, evidently, for Theodoret concludes this homily with the observation that ‘the whole earth under the sun has been filled with sermons’.

Augustine contentedly observed the rapid decline of the atomist philosophy in the first century of Christian rule. By his time, he recorded, Epicurean and Stoic philosophy had been ‘suppressed’—the word is his. The opinions of such philosophers ‘have been so completely eradicated and suppressed… that if any school of error now emerged against the truth, that is, against the Church of Christ, it would not dare to step forth for battle if it were not covered under the Christian name’…

Much was preserved. Much, much more was destroyed. It has been estimated that less than ten per cent of all classical literature has survived into the modern era. For Latin, the figure is even worse: it is estimated that only one hundredth of all Latin literature remains. If this was ‘preservation’—as it is often claimed to be—then it was astonishingly incompetent. If it was censorship, it was brilliantly effective. The ebullient, argumentative classical world was, quite literally, being erased.